One Girl's Notions About Life… (un)censored and funky-fresh

Learning to Love Myself

My marriage is going on 7 years this year… SEVEN! It’s taken me a few of those years to finally have the guts to talk about something that happened to me after I married the man who, today, I call “my Champion”.

I don’t share this lightly… So be nice… Pretty please.

After I got married, I got fat.

I didn’t just gain a few “love” pounds… I got so chunky-monkey fat that I had to buy new underwear. Any woman knows that the minute you have to buy new underwear because your derrière is a little too plump for the current ones, you’re in big trouble! Right about now, you might be thinking “WOW! Bizarre! She was an athlete all her life… Never over weight… There must have been a medical condition that made her addicted to sitting on the couch and stuffing her face.” Trust me, I thought the same thing too. I went to the doctor and begged her to run every blood test imaginable because something was clearly wrong. She agreed that something was off so she did, only to find everything come back totally normal.

It was in that moment, sitting in a sterile doctor’s office, on top of crinkly paper, in a cloth gown that resembled a cheap bed sheet, that I had to come face to face with what was really wrong. I was clearly more in love with the Golden Arches and Ben & Jerry’s than I was with myself.

Put the fork down!

Walk away from the pantry!

Get real, Dollface! What’s really going on?

I had just married the man of my dreams and I was starving, except it wasn’t for food… I was starving for love. This lack in my life was no fault of his. I married the hottest, most caring, loving, doting, heart-of-gold, Godly man you have ever known. Clearly this was my junk and I desperately needed to figure it out.

I remember back to the people who would brush it off and say “Oh honey you are so in love!” I remember thinking umm… 10 pounds is love… 60 pounds is just plain raw freak-out mode mixed in with a trainwreck.

I was stuffing myself with food so I didn’t have to face the true fact that no matter how much people told me or showed me they loved me, I didn’t have an ounce of love or respect for myself. I had come face-to-face with the fact that I had no clue how to even begin to be loved by a man… The same man that just vowed to spend the rest of his life with me. My jacked up thinking told me that if I could just insulate myself then I wouldn’t have to deal with “love.”

My wake-up call to begin loving myself put me on a journey that marked some of the most significant, heartbreaking, amazing moments in my life. My journey brought people into my life that I will be grateful for until my last breath. They taught me things, about the world, about possibility but most of all, about love. They were the most necessary moments that shattered my soul, flipped my world upside down and in the end, taught me not only to love myself but let others love me in ways I never dreamed possible.

So many of us are on journeys right at this moment. The thing I know about being human is that a lot of times we don’t talk about those journeys because they are raw and scary and don’t look very pretty to the outside world. If you are on one such journey, be still and delve deep inside. Figure it out for yourself and then spread that freedom and love like a wildfire to the people in your life.

The most terrifying journey’s are often times the most necessary. It is at the end of those journey’s that we are able to share our experiences with the world in bold confidence of who we have become.